It looks like most of the big ideas have been discovered (although physicists were saying this in the 1890s as well), but there are still many things whose collective behavior is not well understood.
> It looks like most of the big ideas have been discovered (although physicists were saying this in the 1890s as well)
Are many people really saying that now? I'm emphatically not an expert, but my impression was that it's generally agreed that there are clear theoretical signs (quantum physics vs. general relativity) as well as experimental ones (dark energy, dark matter etc.) that our understanding of fundamental physics remains highly incomplete, and that completing it will likely require a lot of very novel physics. There are some hot takes that there may simply be no grand theory that could explain all the relevant observations, but AFAICT they're far from being the general consensus. The more common pessimism is that humanity has been stuck in roughly the same place for several decades now, and there's no clear sign of any experimental or theoretical line of attack that (still) seems likely to get us out of it. This situation doesn't really resemble the complacent belief in the near-completeness of fundamental physics that supposedly existed in the 1890s. (And I'm not sure if that complacency was actually as strong as it's often claimed to be, at least among actual research physicists of the time as opposed to onlookers and popularisers.)
It's very possible, likely even, that enormous areas of physics still have plenty of room for major discoveries and subsequent applications to new discoveries. Furthermore, tying even increments of these major possible discoveries to the existing field of knowledge and application would by itself lead to a great deal of new exploration. But what if we haven't advanced much in several decades because we now suffer from or soon will suffer from the Dog Problem?
Basically: no matter how hard you try, you couldn't teach a dog how to perform engine mechanics (or any number of other higher cognition things), simply because its cranial biology isn't up to the task of fundamentally understanding such things. I have a sneaking (layman's) fear that we might be close to our own version of the same thing in certain fields.
It would be nice to argue that AI augmentation of human-led scientific advancement will help us along considerably, but it still seems deeply hand wavy to say that. Sure, computers help enormously with vast amounts of technical number crunching, and enable the practical application of physics (among other fields) in ways that we could never achieve without them, but fundamental, self-directed discovery is still way beyond the scope of any AI I know of or foresee for the near future.
In some respects it seems like you're arguing P=NP. It may not be the case however. It's certainly a possibility that the system cannot be perfectly determined from within the system.
I'm not taking any position here myself on what's possible. Similarly I can't say whether finding a theory to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics really depends on P being equal to NP, but I can say that it certainly doesn't seem to be generally accepted that it does.
I agree with the sentiment, but would say it slightly differently: I think most big ideas about fundamental physical laws that are testable by present-day technology have likely been discovered. This spells the "end of physics" only if one defines physics narrowly (IMO as a non-physicist) as only the search for fundamental physical laws.
I guess the next big thing will be discovering the structure of the atom's nuclei. There's a simplistic model of it and no means to actually inspect it. It's a lot like the pre-Rutherford models of the atom.
> While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice.
That's Albert Michelson, famous by the Michelson-Morley interferometer, that you know, helped destroing some of those "grand underlying principles" of physics and lead the way to the modern relativity theories.
By the way, he said that after the experiment, when he already had the result. But before the most interesting consequences of it were explored. If you search for him on the web, there's another famous phrase with him impressed, saying that it only took one extra decimal to change everything.
Until we can describe and fully understand how clouds of particles can become conscious and self aware and what truly happened and will happen to the universe before it’s beginning and after its end, we understand nothing of the grand pattern other than that there is one.
Always baffled me how even some more accomplished scientists make arrogant statements like that.
There'a a long list of physical phenomena we're unable to explain yet.
In the historical treatment of math and science from the turn of the 19th century, I can't help but hear a familiar ring of, "Gentlemen, we've finally gotten to the bottom of science."
We seem to hear the argument about the "end of physics" every so often, on multiple time scales. This argument usually arises in the context of high energy/particle physics. Unfortunately for those saying things like this particle/high energy physics is not equivalent to "physics". Its not the entirety, nor the majority of physics.
Yet we keep seeing this discussed as if it is. This isn't an HN issue. This is an contextual issue in the broader physics community.
I've raised this point here, and other places, before. It is important to understand that people claiming an end to physics, are usually being hyperbolic about one specific subfield that seems to have run into a set of dead ends for the moment. Not the entirety of physics.
As I've noted, this is a recurring theme throughout physics. Max Planck was apparently told that there was "nothing new to be discovered in physics"[1]. There are other examples of this throughout history. Some of these theories had the weight of government or religious institutions behind them (earth-centric view of the universe, etc.). To question them was to be labeled a heretic, a blasphemer, or worse.
Physics isn't over. Not by a long shot. If someone wants to argue semantics over "fundamental" vs "non-fundamental", they are welcome to, though their argument will only contribute to hastening the heat death of the universe[2]. That is, energy will be expended for no useful work.
There are existing deep, profound questions, which are ultimately fundamental in nature, that we have not answered yet. And our asking of these questions, has exposed other concerns over our understanding of "fundamental" ... really ... foundational ... physics.
Some of these questions are opening profound links between seemingly disparate fields. That is, physics is getting broader and more intricate. Just because one small (yes, really) subfield nears its end (really due to economic and time constraints, you can't spend infinite amounts of money to build the next generations of colliders), doesn't mean the rest of the subfields are.
Physics has made a tremendous progress since then. So, while continuing to pour billions into HEP research, we can be pretty sure that historical parallels sometimes do not work.
Physics had made tremendous progress in the time leading up to Max Planck, too. Your argument is basically the same one used last time.
We just don't know what we don't know.
I wouldn't bet that 'this time' we do actually know our stuff. It sounds too much like an elementary-school kid who has no conception of calculus and thinks once they've finished geometry they'll have learned all there is to know about math.
"I've made tremendous progress in math since learning multiplication. Surely this time I'll have figured it all out. I already know division and exponents. What more could there possibly be after geometry?"
The fact that we already know an awful lot of Physics doesn't mean we're any closer to even think about it. A few broad examples not in Applied Physics next:
We don't have a working and then fully boring computationally detailed theory of quantum gravity. We have candidates for BSM physics and BSM facts such as neutrino masses but we don't have a BSM SM. We have a 120 orders of magnitude problem with the cosmological constant. We don't know what this stuff that we call dark matter which shows up pretty much everywhere is. We don't have an actual mechanism for inflation. We don't even have hope for maths department rigorous QFT any time soon.
And then there's stuff like nuclear physics which is dark and full of models even when you know it's all somehow QCD, whose confinement problem isn't solved yet.
But then apparently people preach on the Internets that philosophical interpretations of QM are the real problems and some other people preach to their choir that spending money on actual experiments by actual particle physicists asking to do them for getting data that would help is a scientific waste unless you afterwards match somebody else's theory paper published beforehand.
I would happily contemplate the end of musing about the future of fundamental Physics so we all could focus on the meat and potatoes of Physics, which is maybe a less fun and a bit more technical endeavour but also surely a more productive one.
Sorry about the acronyms, they seem to seep through. That's right, it's chromodynamics, a conventional term after the whimsical naming of the symmetry of the strong interaction.
As a complete non-physicist (whatever that means), I feel uncomfortable about this quote in general (or the thinking related to it) for some reason:
"Instead of studying a natural phenomenon, and subsequently discovering a law of nature, one could first design a new law and then reverse engineer a system that actually displays the phenomena described by the law."
I throw that in the bucket of virtual particles, massless things, string theory and all that other untestable mess (which again, I admit to knowing little about)
Agree with the sentiment, String Theory is (right now) untestable. However, virtual particles are part of the standard model and have been indirectly shown to exist by particle accelerators. "Shown to exist" here means "a theory which includes virtual particles makes correct predictions, while other theories don't"
I guess (again, I'm showing my ignorance here) my question is related to some boundary (?) between science and math. I've always imagined or believed that science was founded on testability? If it "fits" the model but it isn't directly testable, that passes the sniff test?
4+x=9 -- there are a lot of options for x, some much more convoluted than others, and a lot more impractical, and I guess all mathematically "viable" (?) But when it comes to physics, shouldn't it be more connected to reality than that?
We can infer specific properties of the virtual particles. Mass, spin, charge among others, depending on what we’re talking about. If those properties match up with expectation, we consider this strong support of the theoretical formalism.
We can even measure more fancy stuff like virtual loop contribution to transition processes. This mostly works by measuring the transition probabilities with extreme precision, and then comparing it with higher-order theoretical predictions of the probabilities.
It sounds like mathematics. Just design a system where condition X holds true (commutativity or parallel lines converging or whatever) and then explore it till you can generalize from it.
Another (albeit restrictive) way to consider the progress of science is asking what practical advances it has made that people value. Obviously the understanding that allowed us to create semiconductors and lasers has been put to good use, but, outside of biology, have there been many discoveries from science in the past 50 years, say?
I'm not saying that the only research worth doing is that which leads to an institution or company making a profit from the discoveries, but understanding the economic factors behind scientific research is helpful if we want to think about its future trajectory.
To go some way towards answering my question above, though, I will give the examples of graphene (isolated and characterized in 2004) and arguably the understanding from climate science about how the Earth's climate can vary with specific changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration (which has important policy implications).
Others can probably think of a few more, although there is much scope for debate about what counts as a "discovery" and "science". For example, public-key cryptography was invented in 1970s, but this could be said to be "merely doing engineering" or "merely inventing mathematical processes" rather than learning about the natural world.
How about the blue and white LEDs which were invented and improved over the last 30 years? May seem like a relatively modest example, but the applications made possible by them are everywhere, from smartphones to LED video walls and energy-saving lighting solutions.
Lots of material sciences, also knock-on effects like CERN needing lots of non-physics related stuff done to the point that I have been using CERN's docs to work on automated pipe cutter in factory...
One argument I like is that if you're only interested in practical value of science, then consider that the data processing requirements for CERN operating the LHC were a large factor driving the development of cloud computing. The value of cloud computing in the economy is so large that if the project accelerated it by just a small amount, that added value is still to be measured in the billions of dollars.
And that's not even considering the value of technological developments such as better magnets that were needed to build and upgrade the collider.
I'm paraphrasing Nima Arkani-Hamed in a lecture where he talks about the value of doing fundamental research, but I wasn't able to find a concrete link to it in 30 minutes of skimming on youtube, since there are many many hours of those lectures to go through.
Not sure whether you were specifically interested in the history of cloud computing or unconvinced by the justification of CERNs existence. But FWIW, another spinoff of CERN was the web.
That's because scientists had political power. If the same investment went to support government operations or business in general, it would have motivated to the same productivity much more cost efficiently.
Robert Gordon makes a similar claim in his works, that the pace of technological discovery has slowed down. He has a lot of numbers to back his claim up.
I think we have invested a lot of time and energy in social solutions rather than technical solutions compare to the mid-20th century. The biggest example of this is the worldwide adoption of English as a lingua franca. It's not high tech for sure, but it's a sea change in human civilization that has had many positive effects for hundreds of millions of people, and that number will only grow.
Now does this effort conflict with science and technology? I don't know, but it seems like since the 1960s we have focused more of our efforts on global convergence rather than pushing frontiers.
It seems pretty dependant on where you draw the line. If we have quantum-computers in the near-future, did this come from "general" science, or the development/refinement of existing science?
There are different kinds of invention, and they're not interchangeable - in the philosophical sense of how much new creative and physical space they open up for exploration.
Modern computing is qualitatively different to a 17th century calculating mechanism like Napier's Bones. It doesn't just do the same thing but faster, it does a lot more besides, and it creates social, political, and economic effects that extend far beyond the physics and math involved in construction and programming.
QC will probably be similar. It's too early to tell what the qualitative changes will be, but QC's place on the developmental tree of technology will depend on how unexpected and extreme they are, and not just on how hard it is to get to a useful number of cubits.
It's interesting to consider what disciplines it makes sense to imagine being "completed" one day. Physics definitely yes. But imagining a "complete chemistry" one day is harder (revealing chemistry is as much an art as a science, as much about building as about discovering)
And imagining a "complete mathematics" seems even harder.
How can we say that physics is "completed" with unsolved questions such as dark matter, dark energy or gravity?
I'm baffled with the amount of comments agreeing with this sentiment.
Saying that physics is mostly solved at this point is just outright arrogant. Didn't we have the exact same situation around the beginning of the 20th century?
Just one little problem to solve - the ultraviolet catastrophe. Sigh...
I wasn't saying physics has been completely already, only that it seems fairly easy to imagine a future point at which it becomes completed. Physics becomes "solved" as it were, much like checkers, and there's no more physics research to do, only problems of physics education, science communication etc remain. On the other hand, it's not at all obvious that we can easily imagine chemistry one day becoming "completed". Part of the reason is perhaps because the properties of compounds are not straightforwardly predictable from those of their constituents; chemistry remains heavy empirical, computation chemistry is never seen as a central branch of chemistry.
“ Nature’s agonizingly slow process of discovery, driven by cosmological and biological evolution on time scales of millions and billions of years, is accelerated to breakneck speeds in the laboratory.”
The slow process is not quite true.
For example, humans have about a half a million polypeptide machines (proteins, etc.) that make up the human body.
They are made of 20 amino acids in sequence and can be 10s to 100000s units in length.
If you calculate amount of polypeptides ribosomes could make given the base 4 DNA string and the choice of 20 amino acids, you will find there are not enough planck voxels in the observable universe to digitally represent them. I.e. the fact that nature found 500k to use for humans to be constructed in only a handful of billion years is profound.
It would have made more sense had the universe just been existing forever with no beginning.
There are about 25k unique protein coding genes in the human genome, not 500k.
Additionally, there appears to be a size limit to proteins. The largest human protein, titin, is about 40k amino acids. No larger protein has ever been discovered.
Obviously 20^40000 is an incomprehensible coding space, but we can with a few broad strokes narrow that number down immensely.
For starters, Eugene Koonin argues in The Logic of Chance, and elsewhere, that the evolution of proteins is limited by the amount of stable folds available in cell-like aqueous conditions. It's an impossible number to quantify but we do know that even most cellular proteins will naturally misfold coming off the ribosome unless aided by chaperones, so we can assume that coding space is drastically decreased.
Furthermore, because of inertia, there are many combinations evolution simply will not sample. Most genes evolve by genome duplication events. The conclusion of the process is that youre never going to get too far away from what you stated with, and indeed we see this is the case with there only being a handful of true, conserved orthogonal genes (these number in the hundreds).
Obviously, n = 1, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is that once you have stable structure/function chemistry, there's probably many many routes to "humans" or something else able to be self aware. We just see one of them because of we were guided here by earth chemistry and inertia.
What is far more confusing is how the ribosome evolved in the first place, because that's the true de novo lynchpin of cellular life.
Most protein coding genes produce multiple proteins, through having multiple isoforms, and proteins are modified post-translationally. 500,000 is on the higher end of estimates I've heard, but hundreds of thousands is the right order of magnitude.
Yeah, splicing gets weird but the biggest estimate I've ever heard is 100k, and again, that's an estimate, not something we have determined empirically.
However, I don't believe it impacts the coding space problem to the same degree. For starters, isoforms tend to have the same fold and similar, but modulated function, and plenty of life exists without them. They aren't randomly sampled the way that is suggested in the OP. Again, truly orthogonal genes number in the hundreds in all the known genome of all known life.
If you start to add PTMs to the mix, then the truth is that we have no idea. A single protein will produce dozens of visible PTMs, probably thousands of invisible ones since even our most sensitive methods detect only population averages. On that vein, any individual protein also has a number of defects from translation, allosteric modification, etc. Proteins are obviously dynamic molecules, but those dynamics are of limited genetic tractability and are significantly different from environment to environment.
I think I'm still going to stick to my initial argument which is that amino acid combinations are substantially more constrained than is being suggested.
"Humans didn’t appear out of a void of randomness"
They did though, at least according to the materialist position which we now mostly accept as being 'science'.
We basically define the universe 'as having a bunch of rules, which can be modelled' - in which case ... there literally is no life or rather a 'bag of random particles' (you) in a random environment, interacting according to some rules ... which is just net randomness.
A researcher once said that evolution is no more interesting than a rock rolling down a hill - and he's right, from a materialist perspective. Nothing is 'evolving' any more than the ball of wax in a lava lamp lumping together and apart - it's just 'stuff happening randomly'.
The problem with this materialist view when taken to it's full extent, is that it completely denies the most important reality to us - that we are 'life'. What we care about is the expression of life, we don't write laws to protect 'random bags of talking jelly' - our entire cultural foundation surrounds this notion of our being alive. And FYI - most common definitions of life exhibit this 'consciousness' problem, in that they may use biological terms, reproduction, all of that, but it's ultimately mechanical and materialist.
So scientific materialism essentially denies the existence life as we commonly understand it preemptively, causing some deep existential problems.
'The Problem With Physics' I think is not 'Dark Matter' - it's the fact that it really hasn't brought us any closer to understanding what we actually are, which is the big question.
There is a movement called 'emergence' which starts to move the needle on this, starting from a fairly material perspective but is ultimately metaphysical, at least it's a start.
>The problem with this materialist view when taken to it's full extent, is that it completely denies the most important reality to us - that we are 'life'. What we care about is the expression of life, we don't write laws to protect 'random bags of talking jelly' - our entire cultural foundation surrounds this notion of our being alive. And FYI - most common definitions of life exhibit this 'consciousness' problem, in that they may use biological terms, reproduction, all of that, but it's ultimately mechanical and materialist.
Valuing life is a purely emotional and cultural thing. We care more about the lives of our relatives and friends than random strangers but we also care more about random strangers because they are the same species as us than we care about the lives of other species.
Sometimes humans (by that I mean the Nazis) think other humans (e.g. Jews) are "inhuman" and deserve death as a punishment. (e.g. Holocaust)
There is obviously no scientific basis in valuing life. It's a choice everyone makes for themselves.
The HN submission about male chicks being shredded or even gassed is basically the same thing as the Holocaust but for chicken. Industrial killing of life, yet we don't care as long as we get our eggs.
Thousands of years ago the world used to be lawless even for humans. Tribes were constantly engaging in violent conflicts. They didn't care one bit about the life of someone or something they deemed unimportant.
We care about life because we are selfish and if someone takes a life away that we care about we want to satisfy our selfishness and engage in revenge against the killer.
So your comment misses two important points I'm trying to convey:
1) "It's a choice everyone makes for themselves."
You cannot make a choice
(According to Materialist Physics)
You are nothing but random noise.
A random equation cannot 'make' choices, it cannot 'make' anything there is nothing being 'made'.
There is no such thing as 'intelligence' in random noise.
So take a moment to grasp that for a second, because it reveals something about the first part of your statement:
2) "There is obviously no scientific basis in valuing life."
What you mean to say is maybe there is no 'Materialist Scientific Basis' for valuing life. Because according to physics, why should we?
But again from (1) there is no such thing as 'value' or 'emotion' or even 'choice' in random noise - you can see they hypocrisy of the statement.
You're caught in a 'Chinese Finger Trap' of Scientific Materialism.
You cannot on one hand talk about 'choice' 'values' because physics says those would be 'emotional' choices, when at the same time, materialist physics also tells us that there is no choice, emotion, intelligence, consciousness to begin with.
Physics is telling us that you and I are just rocks rolling down a hill. We hit a bump, we go one way or another. That's it. No choice, no intelligence, no science, no discoveries, nothing is 'evolving' - just pure random noise like the fuzzy screen on the old TV sets.
Remember that physics has not proven that the universe exists according to a certain set of rules.
Physics is postulating that. We assume the Universe can be described as a set of equations, so we go about trying to describe things using equations.
Because these equations have been very objectively helpful to us over the last few hundred years, and using them we can get rid of a bunch of fairy tales and ridiculous ideas ... we've come to believe that Physics itself is the search for truth.
But it's not - Physics is only the search for material truth within the constraints that it's set for itself.
By definition, physics may not be able to help us understand the meaning of life because they've resigned themselves to studying the lego blocks of life.
Now consider an alternative: the perspective of 'the observer' and that Science is merely a tool for understanding the Universe around is - that Science is not a 'Truth' but a 'Tool'.
That 'life' is the basis of our existence, and that it expresses itself via materialism, but is not entirely constructed of that materialism.
The only reason we take any real interest in Materialist Science, ironically, is because of our creative impulses.
Obviously - it's abstract, and not prone to equations, and can easily devolve into 'magical thinking' but that doesn't invalidate the ultimate premise of non-materialist thinking.
Below the 'tree trunk' of Physics is 'Metaphysics' and it's worth remember that physics at any given time is only one way of interpreting the universe.
Plenty of big problems and small problems in physics to be solved. My father was a research physicist who sat on the international committee for defining temperature, his little contribution to the world was to improve the low temperature model of measurement to make it 50000 times more accurate... and still had a lot of room for improvement. An area still under active research. At the broad scale we need to understand the mysteries of dark energy/matter, develop a quantum understanding of gravity, etc..... One problem that's happened is a lot of the physics in the early 20th century didn't have any experimental proof till late 20th century, physics pushes at our technological limits and has to wait patiently :)
Are we going to simply give up when it comes to understanding the fundamental nature of complexity? Why do multi-component systems undergo phase changes, why does it occur at the points at which they do, how could we design simple systems which, in sufficient quantity, exhibit useful properties upon phase shift? What techniques can be used to predict or derive macro-scale emergent phenomenon from micro-scale complex interactions? Why, exactly and with the same precision as quantum mechanics achieves, is more different?
For solving our problems as a species/society/individual we should assume physics is basically over. We should assume either there is not much more to find, or even if there is a lot more there isn't a way to make new technology leverage it.
We don't make this assumption because it is true. I honestly don't think it is true but we should make this assumption because we must ignore the attractive hazard of seeing simply waiting for new physics and new technology to be the solution to our problems.
I bet theoretical physics will play a crucial role in cultural shifts over the next century.
You can find a strong parallel between the emerging "metamodernism" era and Hawking's "model-dependent realism": the acceptance of contradicting realities.
We potentially face a future cultural enlightenment in which theoretical physics plays both a philosophical and expository role— a future which acknowledges the importance of the observer in the "actual" nature of reality.
I suspect that meaningful progress in physics is going to face two hurdles for a couple of decades:
* Society has to catch up with what we have discovered over the past century. The physics that most people learn is primarily classical mechanics plus a bit of electricity and magnetism. There is some discussion of other aspects of physics, but it tends to be limited to discussion. You need some degree of mathematical understanding in order for physics to have a meaningful impact. The mathematical basis is important since it gives the ability to test the validity of physical models. This ability to verify or falsify a model is fundamental to science. High level discussions of a topic usually ignore the mathematics, which means they are asking students to accept something based upon authority. That is problematic since it is far too easy to choose an authority based upon criteria other than verifiable truths when one doesn't have the tools to verify what is being said.
* Technology also has to play catch-up. Physics has always been an expensive field since it pushes the boundaries of engineering. The precision instruments of past centuries may appear as quaint as a (quality) modern ruler, but they were pushing the limits of the times. That being said, there is a difference in scale. Pushing the boundaries of physics may have taken the resources of a nation in the recent past and wealthy benefactors in the more distant past. Some of the more recent experiments, though admittedly exceptional, take an international effort.
I don't really think that physics is coming to an end. I do think that some areas of physics will stagnate until humanity catches up with it.
> There is some discussion of other aspects of physics, but it tends to be limited to discussion. You need some degree of mathematical understanding in order for physics to have a meaningful impact.
What meaningful impact would, say, quantum chromodynamics have on the life of anyone other than a theoretical physicist? I don't see how more widespread education about these things would affect the field of physics itself, since any version taught to the masses would have to be extremely boiled down.
> What meaningful impact would, say, quantum chromodynamics have on the life of anyone other than a theoretical physicist?
Its not hard to imagine (at least for me) arcane bits of knowledge that only centuries later (if such hasn't been "lost" in between) became more relevant to others endeavors if one looks to history as any example… our current collective imagination from this present moment of what we know is no boundary on what could ever be known or useful… and for those who could imagine may never live long enough to see what could come from such.
> If quantum-computing sees broad application, middle-schoolers will be speaking the language of bras and kets within a decade.
If quantum-computing sees broad application, middle-schoolers will be speaking the language of bras and kets within a couple of centuries, if the concept of middle school as we imagine/experience it today is even around and hasn't been relegated in part by being able to evoke a certain distribution of mass/energy in what we call our brains that could encode such knowledge from birth…
“Nobody understands quantum mechanics.” This being as true as when it was first said, it is philosophy of physics that is still severely lacking, and that is where we hope to see some progress, eventually.
Figure out how to make quantum mechanics make sense to people. That’s my challenge for physicists. Find an interpretation that’s intuitive or comprehensible or something.
I am afraid that may be impossible, and the infamous “shut up and calculate” may be all we will ever have as a guiding principle. Things “make sense” to us only because they are either hardwired in our brain in the course of human evolution, or if we are used to them since the early childhood, or they can be explained in terms of those. Quantum mechanics affords none of such.
The "interpretation" is what makes it hard to understand. If you just study the rules it is less confusing. (But still hard, because it is legitimately complicated and different from our instictive human-scale senses, like relativity.)
I have two main problems with the idea of the end of physics:
1. Physics has an obfuscation problem - the terminology is too thick so we can't see meta connections between concepts or form new insights at other levels of abstraction.
2. Tragically, the more advanced physics gets (as in the more money is directed at things like high-energy particle colliders), the fewer real-world applications are found for new discoveries.
The problem with (1) is that, the deeper we look into the edge cases, the less we are sure we know what we are doing. For example, I looked up "nucleon self-wave" because I couldn't remember the terminology around self-interaction, and stumbled onto this article:
Not to pick on it too much, but even if it wasn't behind a paywall, it would probably take 10 years of study to even begin to read it.
Why is this important? Because when we're thinking about the very large or small, second-order effects usually overwhelm any first-order effects that we're used to. So we don't have the abstractions to properly think about what happens in, say, the nucleus of an atom. The vast majority of weekend warriors brainstorming about physics will never get anywhere, because their initial assumptions have little bearing on reality. In other words, today we're unlikely to stumble onto a new idea along the lines of relativity or quantum mechanics, because we can't see the forest for the trees and simply map the evidence to formulas which describe it.
A simple example of this is the recent hubbub about black hole information escape. As a layman, I can totally understand how a particle could teleport across the event horizon. But as a layman, I also look at different edge cases. If we imagine space as flowing into a black hole at faster than the speed of light past the event horizon, then I find it extremely unlikely that matter will ever teleport out. It's probably all packed into the center, squeezed smaller than a neutron (since pressure there is higher than neutron degeneracy pressure) and maybe even traveling backwards through time, while the event horizon is miles away:
Can someone prove to me that the new equations account for all that, and more importantly, fit the explanation on a napkin? Probably not. I have to take their "proof" on faith. Not good.
The problem with (2) has more to do with attention than failures of execution. We spend $10 billion here on a particle accelerator, $10 billion there on a fusion reactor, but absolutely nothing on grants to hackers. The next Einstein is likely working for a startup somewhere optimizing ad revenue. He or she will simply never have the time to daydream and see the forest for the trees.
My prediction for the 21st century is that this problem will become so widespread that capitalism will reach maximum underemployment. Nearly everyone will spend the entirety of their lives paying the fruits of their labor to wealthy individuals and organizations to innovate in areas that are profitable but aren't material to human progress.
A specific example of this is an organization like Google (again, not to pick on them) sinking vast sums into proprietary/niche machine learning hardware and software, rather than providing general-purpose parallelized computing to the masses. We should be able to buy 1000+ core chips for around $100 and program them with something open source like GNU Octave or run a Docker swarm utilizing every core so we can run our Python programs 1000+ times faster. Instead we have to adapt our experiments to subsets of computer science like DSP and SIMD. So we focus on neural nets or genetic algorithms and completely miss the abstract portions of machine learning that don't care about implementation details.
And why that's important is that stuff with seemingly emergent behavior (like fluid dynamics) can become tractable when we're not compute-limited. But we can't build simple simulations from first principles and scale them, because we're forced to rely on cookie cutter tools for NVIDIA video cards that others have put together because most languages and frameworks aren't up to the challenge of modeling whatever we're trying to do.
Put all this together, and the real innovation is either hopelessly out of reach (who has a compute cluster?) or is happening on a shoestring on YouTube instead of at CERN. I don't know whether to laugh or cry about that.
Sorry this got long, but I've been discussing physics like crazy during the first vacation the world's had in half a century, courtesy of COVID-19. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
With the discovery of bronze, we have reached the end of metallurgy. Our ancestors struggled with inferior iron, often unalloyed and scooped out of riverbanks and swamps. But our technology has now progressed to the point of creating the perfect metal. It is very likely we have achieved the pinnacle of science. There is nothing more to learn!
Maybe it's time for a revival of idealism (in the philosophical sense of the term). Its rejection would account for a lot of the current frontiers in physics.
Most people here are familiar with concepts from occultism. Reciting quotes from kaballah would give you an illusion of superiority and downvotes.
Famous scientists give references to occultism, but they do it in a subtle way. For example, someone (Dirac?) said that it's funny how the atom is 42 orders of magnitude bigger than the planks length and 42 orders of magnitude smaller than the universe - 42 must be the key to the universe then!
Amusing. It's like a cavemen saying "Yep, we are done. We made fire ourselves, what else could there possibly be?"
I mean we did a whole 200 years of scientific research. Of course, there is little else to discover. Humans are smart after all.
There are only a "few" obvious questions left:
* Can we generate a black-hole? If so how? If not, where is the proof?
* Can we move faster than light? If so how? If not, where is the proof?
* Are wormholes real? If so how? If not, where is the proof?
* Can we travel backwards in time and if so, how do we do it?
* Where did the universe come from?
* What is outside of the universe? I.e. where does it expand into?
* Are there other universes? Where is the evidence? Can we build a machine to go there? How do we build this machine?
* Can we prevent the sun from dying?
* Or let's start with the basics. How can we predict the weather of tomorrow reliably? How can we prevent our earth from becoming uninhabitable?
* Is the silicon really the best we can do for computers?
But sure, we are done with physics. Let's just bathe in our glory and praise ourselves as gods lol.
Humans are experts at forgetting that "Mathematics does not proof anything outside of mathematics". All we have are models. Are we at the end of our models? Perhaps? But all that means is that we need better models and perhaps even different mathematics.
It looks like most of the big ideas have been discovered (although physicists were saying this in the 1890s as well), but there are still many things whose collective behavior is not well understood.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_W._Anderson
Are many people really saying that now? I'm emphatically not an expert, but my impression was that it's generally agreed that there are clear theoretical signs (quantum physics vs. general relativity) as well as experimental ones (dark energy, dark matter etc.) that our understanding of fundamental physics remains highly incomplete, and that completing it will likely require a lot of very novel physics. There are some hot takes that there may simply be no grand theory that could explain all the relevant observations, but AFAICT they're far from being the general consensus. The more common pessimism is that humanity has been stuck in roughly the same place for several decades now, and there's no clear sign of any experimental or theoretical line of attack that (still) seems likely to get us out of it. This situation doesn't really resemble the complacent belief in the near-completeness of fundamental physics that supposedly existed in the 1890s. (And I'm not sure if that complacency was actually as strong as it's often claimed to be, at least among actual research physicists of the time as opposed to onlookers and popularisers.)
Basically: no matter how hard you try, you couldn't teach a dog how to perform engine mechanics (or any number of other higher cognition things), simply because its cranial biology isn't up to the task of fundamentally understanding such things. I have a sneaking (layman's) fear that we might be close to our own version of the same thing in certain fields.
It would be nice to argue that AI augmentation of human-led scientific advancement will help us along considerably, but it still seems deeply hand wavy to say that. Sure, computers help enormously with vast amounts of technical number crunching, and enable the practical application of physics (among other fields) in ways that we could never achieve without them, but fundamental, self-directed discovery is still way beyond the scope of any AI I know of or foresee for the near future.
Did you mean to allude to Godel's incompleteness theorem instead?
Edit: emphasis on "only" added
That's Albert Michelson, famous by the Michelson-Morley interferometer, that you know, helped destroing some of those "grand underlying principles" of physics and lead the way to the modern relativity theories.
By the way, he said that after the experiment, when he already had the result. But before the most interesting consequences of it were explored. If you search for him on the web, there's another famous phrase with him impressed, saying that it only took one extra decimal to change everything.
So much so that LIGO is basically the same thing, used to measure flexible aether theories (eg, relativity).
We can’t detect our drift, but we can detect far away objects causing aether ripples.
Yet we keep seeing this discussed as if it is. This isn't an HN issue. This is an contextual issue in the broader physics community.
I've raised this point here, and other places, before. It is important to understand that people claiming an end to physics, are usually being hyperbolic about one specific subfield that seems to have run into a set of dead ends for the moment. Not the entirety of physics.
As I've noted, this is a recurring theme throughout physics. Max Planck was apparently told that there was "nothing new to be discovered in physics"[1]. There are other examples of this throughout history. Some of these theories had the weight of government or religious institutions behind them (earth-centric view of the universe, etc.). To question them was to be labeled a heretic, a blasphemer, or worse.
Physics isn't over. Not by a long shot. If someone wants to argue semantics over "fundamental" vs "non-fundamental", they are welcome to, though their argument will only contribute to hastening the heat death of the universe[2]. That is, energy will be expended for no useful work.
There are existing deep, profound questions, which are ultimately fundamental in nature, that we have not answered yet. And our asking of these questions, has exposed other concerns over our understanding of "fundamental" ... really ... foundational ... physics.
Some of these questions are opening profound links between seemingly disparate fields. That is, physics is getting broader and more intricate. Just because one small (yes, really) subfield nears its end (really due to economic and time constraints, you can't spend infinite amounts of money to build the next generations of colliders), doesn't mean the rest of the subfields are.
[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bpplan.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_history#Francis_Fukuyam...
Physics has made a tremendous progress since then. So, while continuing to pour billions into HEP research, we can be pretty sure that historical parallels sometimes do not work.
We just don't know what we don't know.
I wouldn't bet that 'this time' we do actually know our stuff. It sounds too much like an elementary-school kid who has no conception of calculus and thinks once they've finished geometry they'll have learned all there is to know about math.
"I've made tremendous progress in math since learning multiplication. Surely this time I'll have figured it all out. I already know division and exponents. What more could there possibly be after geometry?"
We don't have a working and then fully boring computationally detailed theory of quantum gravity. We have candidates for BSM physics and BSM facts such as neutrino masses but we don't have a BSM SM. We have a 120 orders of magnitude problem with the cosmological constant. We don't know what this stuff that we call dark matter which shows up pretty much everywhere is. We don't have an actual mechanism for inflation. We don't even have hope for maths department rigorous QFT any time soon.
And then there's stuff like nuclear physics which is dark and full of models even when you know it's all somehow QCD, whose confinement problem isn't solved yet.
But then apparently people preach on the Internets that philosophical interpretations of QM are the real problems and some other people preach to their choir that spending money on actual experiments by actual particle physicists asking to do them for getting data that would help is a scientific waste unless you afterwards match somebody else's theory paper published beforehand.
I would happily contemplate the end of musing about the future of fundamental Physics so we all could focus on the meat and potatoes of Physics, which is maybe a less fun and a bit more technical endeavour but also surely a more productive one.
"Instead of studying a natural phenomenon, and subsequently discovering a law of nature, one could first design a new law and then reverse engineer a system that actually displays the phenomena described by the law."
I throw that in the bucket of virtual particles, massless things, string theory and all that other untestable mess (which again, I admit to knowing little about)
But it all looks so...backwards
4+x=9 -- there are a lot of options for x, some much more convoluted than others, and a lot more impractical, and I guess all mathematically "viable" (?) But when it comes to physics, shouldn't it be more connected to reality than that?
We can even measure more fancy stuff like virtual loop contribution to transition processes. This mostly works by measuring the transition probabilities with extreme precision, and then comparing it with higher-order theoretical predictions of the probabilities.
I'm not saying that the only research worth doing is that which leads to an institution or company making a profit from the discoveries, but understanding the economic factors behind scientific research is helpful if we want to think about its future trajectory.
To go some way towards answering my question above, though, I will give the examples of graphene (isolated and characterized in 2004) and arguably the understanding from climate science about how the Earth's climate can vary with specific changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration (which has important policy implications).
Others can probably think of a few more, although there is much scope for debate about what counts as a "discovery" and "science". For example, public-key cryptography was invented in 1970s, but this could be said to be "merely doing engineering" or "merely inventing mathematical processes" rather than learning about the natural world.
And that's not even considering the value of technological developments such as better magnets that were needed to build and upgrade the collider.
I think we have invested a lot of time and energy in social solutions rather than technical solutions compare to the mid-20th century. The biggest example of this is the worldwide adoption of English as a lingua franca. It's not high tech for sure, but it's a sea change in human civilization that has had many positive effects for hundreds of millions of people, and that number will only grow.
Now does this effort conflict with science and technology? I don't know, but it seems like since the 1960s we have focused more of our efforts on global convergence rather than pushing frontiers.
There are different kinds of invention, and they're not interchangeable - in the philosophical sense of how much new creative and physical space they open up for exploration.
Modern computing is qualitatively different to a 17th century calculating mechanism like Napier's Bones. It doesn't just do the same thing but faster, it does a lot more besides, and it creates social, political, and economic effects that extend far beyond the physics and math involved in construction and programming.
QC will probably be similar. It's too early to tell what the qualitative changes will be, but QC's place on the developmental tree of technology will depend on how unexpected and extreme they are, and not just on how hard it is to get to a useful number of cubits.
And imagining a "complete mathematics" seems even harder.
I'm baffled with the amount of comments agreeing with this sentiment.
Saying that physics is mostly solved at this point is just outright arrogant. Didn't we have the exact same situation around the beginning of the 20th century? Just one little problem to solve - the ultraviolet catastrophe. Sigh...
The slow process is not quite true.
For example, humans have about a half a million polypeptide machines (proteins, etc.) that make up the human body.
They are made of 20 amino acids in sequence and can be 10s to 100000s units in length.
If you calculate amount of polypeptides ribosomes could make given the base 4 DNA string and the choice of 20 amino acids, you will find there are not enough planck voxels in the observable universe to digitally represent them. I.e. the fact that nature found 500k to use for humans to be constructed in only a handful of billion years is profound.
It would have made more sense had the universe just been existing forever with no beginning.
There are about 25k unique protein coding genes in the human genome, not 500k.
Additionally, there appears to be a size limit to proteins. The largest human protein, titin, is about 40k amino acids. No larger protein has ever been discovered.
Obviously 20^40000 is an incomprehensible coding space, but we can with a few broad strokes narrow that number down immensely.
For starters, Eugene Koonin argues in The Logic of Chance, and elsewhere, that the evolution of proteins is limited by the amount of stable folds available in cell-like aqueous conditions. It's an impossible number to quantify but we do know that even most cellular proteins will naturally misfold coming off the ribosome unless aided by chaperones, so we can assume that coding space is drastically decreased.
Furthermore, because of inertia, there are many combinations evolution simply will not sample. Most genes evolve by genome duplication events. The conclusion of the process is that youre never going to get too far away from what you stated with, and indeed we see this is the case with there only being a handful of true, conserved orthogonal genes (these number in the hundreds).
Obviously, n = 1, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is that once you have stable structure/function chemistry, there's probably many many routes to "humans" or something else able to be self aware. We just see one of them because of we were guided here by earth chemistry and inertia.
What is far more confusing is how the ribosome evolved in the first place, because that's the true de novo lynchpin of cellular life.
However, I don't believe it impacts the coding space problem to the same degree. For starters, isoforms tend to have the same fold and similar, but modulated function, and plenty of life exists without them. They aren't randomly sampled the way that is suggested in the OP. Again, truly orthogonal genes number in the hundreds in all the known genome of all known life.
If you start to add PTMs to the mix, then the truth is that we have no idea. A single protein will produce dozens of visible PTMs, probably thousands of invisible ones since even our most sensitive methods detect only population averages. On that vein, any individual protein also has a number of defects from translation, allosteric modification, etc. Proteins are obviously dynamic molecules, but those dynamics are of limited genetic tractability and are significantly different from environment to environment.
I think I'm still going to stick to my initial argument which is that amino acid combinations are substantially more constrained than is being suggested.
They did though, at least according to the materialist position which we now mostly accept as being 'science'.
We basically define the universe 'as having a bunch of rules, which can be modelled' - in which case ... there literally is no life or rather a 'bag of random particles' (you) in a random environment, interacting according to some rules ... which is just net randomness.
A researcher once said that evolution is no more interesting than a rock rolling down a hill - and he's right, from a materialist perspective. Nothing is 'evolving' any more than the ball of wax in a lava lamp lumping together and apart - it's just 'stuff happening randomly'.
The problem with this materialist view when taken to it's full extent, is that it completely denies the most important reality to us - that we are 'life'. What we care about is the expression of life, we don't write laws to protect 'random bags of talking jelly' - our entire cultural foundation surrounds this notion of our being alive. And FYI - most common definitions of life exhibit this 'consciousness' problem, in that they may use biological terms, reproduction, all of that, but it's ultimately mechanical and materialist.
So scientific materialism essentially denies the existence life as we commonly understand it preemptively, causing some deep existential problems.
'The Problem With Physics' I think is not 'Dark Matter' - it's the fact that it really hasn't brought us any closer to understanding what we actually are, which is the big question.
There is a movement called 'emergence' which starts to move the needle on this, starting from a fairly material perspective but is ultimately metaphysical, at least it's a start.
Valuing life is a purely emotional and cultural thing. We care more about the lives of our relatives and friends than random strangers but we also care more about random strangers because they are the same species as us than we care about the lives of other species.
Sometimes humans (by that I mean the Nazis) think other humans (e.g. Jews) are "inhuman" and deserve death as a punishment. (e.g. Holocaust)
There is obviously no scientific basis in valuing life. It's a choice everyone makes for themselves.
The HN submission about male chicks being shredded or even gassed is basically the same thing as the Holocaust but for chicken. Industrial killing of life, yet we don't care as long as we get our eggs.
Thousands of years ago the world used to be lawless even for humans. Tribes were constantly engaging in violent conflicts. They didn't care one bit about the life of someone or something they deemed unimportant.
We care about life because we are selfish and if someone takes a life away that we care about we want to satisfy our selfishness and engage in revenge against the killer.
1) "It's a choice everyone makes for themselves."
You cannot make a choice
(According to Materialist Physics)
You are nothing but random noise.
A random equation cannot 'make' choices, it cannot 'make' anything there is nothing being 'made'.
There is no such thing as 'intelligence' in random noise.
So take a moment to grasp that for a second, because it reveals something about the first part of your statement:
2) "There is obviously no scientific basis in valuing life."
What you mean to say is maybe there is no 'Materialist Scientific Basis' for valuing life. Because according to physics, why should we?
But again from (1) there is no such thing as 'value' or 'emotion' or even 'choice' in random noise - you can see they hypocrisy of the statement.
You're caught in a 'Chinese Finger Trap' of Scientific Materialism.
You cannot on one hand talk about 'choice' 'values' because physics says those would be 'emotional' choices, when at the same time, materialist physics also tells us that there is no choice, emotion, intelligence, consciousness to begin with.
Physics is telling us that you and I are just rocks rolling down a hill. We hit a bump, we go one way or another. That's it. No choice, no intelligence, no science, no discoveries, nothing is 'evolving' - just pure random noise like the fuzzy screen on the old TV sets.
Remember that physics has not proven that the universe exists according to a certain set of rules.
Physics is postulating that. We assume the Universe can be described as a set of equations, so we go about trying to describe things using equations.
Because these equations have been very objectively helpful to us over the last few hundred years, and using them we can get rid of a bunch of fairy tales and ridiculous ideas ... we've come to believe that Physics itself is the search for truth.
But it's not - Physics is only the search for material truth within the constraints that it's set for itself.
By definition, physics may not be able to help us understand the meaning of life because they've resigned themselves to studying the lego blocks of life.
Now consider an alternative: the perspective of 'the observer' and that Science is merely a tool for understanding the Universe around is - that Science is not a 'Truth' but a 'Tool'.
That 'life' is the basis of our existence, and that it expresses itself via materialism, but is not entirely constructed of that materialism.
The only reason we take any real interest in Materialist Science, ironically, is because of our creative impulses.
Obviously - it's abstract, and not prone to equations, and can easily devolve into 'magical thinking' but that doesn't invalidate the ultimate premise of non-materialist thinking.
Below the 'tree trunk' of Physics is 'Metaphysics' and it's worth remember that physics at any given time is only one way of interpreting the universe.
Genesis occurred through time+statistics (=evolution) just as evolution does.
We don't make this assumption because it is true. I honestly don't think it is true but we should make this assumption because we must ignore the attractive hazard of seeing simply waiting for new physics and new technology to be the solution to our problems.
You can find a strong parallel between the emerging "metamodernism" era and Hawking's "model-dependent realism": the acceptance of contradicting realities.
We potentially face a future cultural enlightenment in which theoretical physics plays both a philosophical and expository role— a future which acknowledges the importance of the observer in the "actual" nature of reality.
* Society has to catch up with what we have discovered over the past century. The physics that most people learn is primarily classical mechanics plus a bit of electricity and magnetism. There is some discussion of other aspects of physics, but it tends to be limited to discussion. You need some degree of mathematical understanding in order for physics to have a meaningful impact. The mathematical basis is important since it gives the ability to test the validity of physical models. This ability to verify or falsify a model is fundamental to science. High level discussions of a topic usually ignore the mathematics, which means they are asking students to accept something based upon authority. That is problematic since it is far too easy to choose an authority based upon criteria other than verifiable truths when one doesn't have the tools to verify what is being said.
* Technology also has to play catch-up. Physics has always been an expensive field since it pushes the boundaries of engineering. The precision instruments of past centuries may appear as quaint as a (quality) modern ruler, but they were pushing the limits of the times. That being said, there is a difference in scale. Pushing the boundaries of physics may have taken the resources of a nation in the recent past and wealthy benefactors in the more distant past. Some of the more recent experiments, though admittedly exceptional, take an international effort.
I don't really think that physics is coming to an end. I do think that some areas of physics will stagnate until humanity catches up with it.
What meaningful impact would, say, quantum chromodynamics have on the life of anyone other than a theoretical physicist? I don't see how more widespread education about these things would affect the field of physics itself, since any version taught to the masses would have to be extremely boiled down.
Its not hard to imagine (at least for me) arcane bits of knowledge that only centuries later (if such hasn't been "lost" in between) became more relevant to others endeavors if one looks to history as any example… our current collective imagination from this present moment of what we know is no boundary on what could ever be known or useful… and for those who could imagine may never live long enough to see what could come from such.
If quantum-computing sees broad application, middle-schoolers will be speaking the language of bras and kets within a couple of centuries, if the concept of middle school as we imagine/experience it today is even around and hasn't been relegated in part by being able to evoke a certain distribution of mass/energy in what we call our brains that could encode such knowledge from birth…
Blessed is one who believeth...
1. Physics has an obfuscation problem - the terminology is too thick so we can't see meta connections between concepts or form new insights at other levels of abstraction.
2. Tragically, the more advanced physics gets (as in the more money is directed at things like high-energy particle colliders), the fewer real-world applications are found for new discoveries.
The problem with (1) is that, the deeper we look into the edge cases, the less we are sure we know what we are doing. For example, I looked up "nucleon self-wave" because I couldn't remember the terminology around self-interaction, and stumbled onto this article:
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6862283-imaginary-part-nucleon-s...
Not to pick on it too much, but even if it wasn't behind a paywall, it would probably take 10 years of study to even begin to read it.
Why is this important? Because when we're thinking about the very large or small, second-order effects usually overwhelm any first-order effects that we're used to. So we don't have the abstractions to properly think about what happens in, say, the nucleus of an atom. The vast majority of weekend warriors brainstorming about physics will never get anywhere, because their initial assumptions have little bearing on reality. In other words, today we're unlikely to stumble onto a new idea along the lines of relativity or quantum mechanics, because we can't see the forest for the trees and simply map the evidence to formulas which describe it.
A simple example of this is the recent hubbub about black hole information escape. As a layman, I can totally understand how a particle could teleport across the event horizon. But as a layman, I also look at different edge cases. If we imagine space as flowing into a black hole at faster than the speed of light past the event horizon, then I find it extremely unlikely that matter will ever teleport out. It's probably all packed into the center, squeezed smaller than a neutron (since pressure there is higher than neutron degeneracy pressure) and maybe even traveling backwards through time, while the event horizon is miles away:
https://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/rn.html
Can someone prove to me that the new equations account for all that, and more importantly, fit the explanation on a napkin? Probably not. I have to take their "proof" on faith. Not good.
The problem with (2) has more to do with attention than failures of execution. We spend $10 billion here on a particle accelerator, $10 billion there on a fusion reactor, but absolutely nothing on grants to hackers. The next Einstein is likely working for a startup somewhere optimizing ad revenue. He or she will simply never have the time to daydream and see the forest for the trees.
My prediction for the 21st century is that this problem will become so widespread that capitalism will reach maximum underemployment. Nearly everyone will spend the entirety of their lives paying the fruits of their labor to wealthy individuals and organizations to innovate in areas that are profitable but aren't material to human progress.
A specific example of this is an organization like Google (again, not to pick on them) sinking vast sums into proprietary/niche machine learning hardware and software, rather than providing general-purpose parallelized computing to the masses. We should be able to buy 1000+ core chips for around $100 and program them with something open source like GNU Octave or run a Docker swarm utilizing every core so we can run our Python programs 1000+ times faster. Instead we have to adapt our experiments to subsets of computer science like DSP and SIMD. So we focus on neural nets or genetic algorithms and completely miss the abstract portions of machine learning that don't care about implementation details.
And why that's important is that stuff with seemingly emergent behavior (like fluid dynamics) can become tractable when we're not compute-limited. But we can't build simple simulations from first principles and scale them, because we're forced to rely on cookie cutter tools for NVIDIA video cards that others have put together because most languages and frameworks aren't up to the challenge of modeling whatever we're trying to do.
Put all this together, and the real innovation is either hopelessly out of reach (who has a compute cluster?) or is happening on a shoestring on YouTube instead of at CERN. I don't know whether to laugh or cry about that.
Sorry this got long, but I've been discussing physics like crazy during the first vacation the world's had in half a century, courtesy of COVID-19. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
Twist the physics plan around, enter the new dimension.
You will see yourself watching the physics plane.
Twist the plane around to watch yourself watching the physics plane.
Do it until you see just a dot.
At this point nothing would make any sense other than your breath.
Famous scientists give references to occultism, but they do it in a subtle way. For example, someone (Dirac?) said that it's funny how the atom is 42 orders of magnitude bigger than the planks length and 42 orders of magnitude smaller than the universe - 42 must be the key to the universe then!
I mean we did a whole 200 years of scientific research. Of course, there is little else to discover. Humans are smart after all.
There are only a "few" obvious questions left:
* Can we generate a black-hole? If so how? If not, where is the proof?
* Can we move faster than light? If so how? If not, where is the proof?
* Are wormholes real? If so how? If not, where is the proof?
* Can we travel backwards in time and if so, how do we do it?
* Where did the universe come from?
* What is outside of the universe? I.e. where does it expand into?
* Are there other universes? Where is the evidence? Can we build a machine to go there? How do we build this machine?
* Can we prevent the sun from dying?
* Or let's start with the basics. How can we predict the weather of tomorrow reliably? How can we prevent our earth from becoming uninhabitable?
* Is the silicon really the best we can do for computers?
But sure, we are done with physics. Let's just bathe in our glory and praise ourselves as gods lol.
Humans are experts at forgetting that "Mathematics does not proof anything outside of mathematics". All we have are models. Are we at the end of our models? Perhaps? But all that means is that we need better models and perhaps even different mathematics.